i know and its why i hate thinking about doing it or the people who actually are willing to create air bubbles in their tim...

but as in that picture, with a heatsink on top, is that cpu safe? is that guy going to burn out his cpu when overclocked since some of the chip has absolutely no tim?

The actual cores (the bits that get hot) are right in the middle of the CPU. Here's a 3770K delidded, you can see the rectangular bit in the middle is where the magic happens. As long as thermal paste covers that area you're good.

The meaning of TIM is to fill the microscopic gaps in the material of the chip and the heatsink. Otherwise when you just put the heatsink on the cpu it would work also very well, just here and there those tiny gaps)

Between spreading (Like a idiot, that was when i was young) and rice pea size, rice pea gave me 5-6C better temps dipping from 68 to low 60s
Spreading is only useful for filling up the gaps in a heatpipe direct touch heatsink not to get any of the actual stuff on the pipes themselves or the IHS